Bezhin lug

I saw the reconstruction of this film on the Criterion Collection dvd set Eisenstein: The sound years.The photography is fantastic and I think it would have been a masterpiece but it was destroyed.It could be a bit confusing to follow the story in the reconstruction(it´s something about 30 minutes long)but it´s still very interesting.

This retelling of a classic Communist, collectivist tale is one of the greatest losses to Communism the cinematic world has felt. Destroyed by the Soviets along with several other banned films, restoration artists were able to, more or less successfully, piece the story together again, from the damaged original negative, as a series of stills and a rehashed set of intertitles. The dynamism that must have accompanied the moving images of this film has, unfortunately been lost, but the stills themselves are fantastic, and a great tribute to Eisenstein's art.

You can find the reconstruction of this film on the Criterion released Alexander Nevsky DVD. The photography is absolutely amazing, and, although the story is a bit confusing in the reconstruction, the mood is preserved fiercely by the photography and the added music (by Prokofiev, Eisenstein's later collaborator). Around 25 minutes long, even this reconstruction proves to be a masterpiece. Too bad we don't have a whole.

It is impossible to assess a film that does not exist and never existed, but it is also true that one cannot ignore the masterpiece that it undoubtedly could have been when viewing the very few remains that miraculousy have been restored to us. Just a few photos, focused on a series of important scenes.

They are not shots, because in one shot there is movement, nor are they probably sequences since it is doubtful that all the successive shots of any of the scenes that were shot are preserved, although we would like to think so.

But then there's the famous church desecration scene, in which the town turns a church into a meeting room, dismantling and removing all Orthodox iconography. This sacrilegious scene becomes, by the work and grace of Eisenstein's genius, one of the most beautiful and elevated sequences in the history of cinema. We do not watch to how a religion is destroyed or humiliated or abused, but how it is transformed, reborn into a new one. By dismantling the statues, the icons and replacing them with themselves, the people incarnate in angels, apostles, in the Virgin Mary and in the child Jesus. A Samson separates the columns of the iconostasis, a child is crowned and raised in arms to the heavens. Prokofiev's beautiful music underlines this sacred character of the scene. What could have resulted from blasphemous cruelty, as so often in Soviet cinema, becomes a scene of sweetness and purity unmatched in the history of cinema.

If it is impossible to value a film that no longer exists or that really never existed, we still can value the beauty of some images, imagine how the rhythm and movement would enhance them and regret that a masterpiece of such caliber had been lost. The remains are still a creation of absolute beauty and a lesson about cinematography.

"Bezhin lug" is a film long thought lost. Only in the '60s fragments were found, but even today the film is far from complete. This makes it difficult to write a review.

The film is situated in a Kolchoz. A farmer with nostalgia for his former existence as a free farmer (Samokhin) is betrayed by his own son (Stepok). Stepok becomes a hero because he has warned against "contra revolutionary elements".

Within the oeuvre of Sergei Eisenstein "Bezhin lug" (1937) can be seen in connection with "Old and new" (1929). "Old and new" is about the collectivization of agriculture. In "Bezhin lug" this collectivization is finished but has to be defended against the already mentioned "contra revolutionary elements".

The film is very revealing about the nature of totalitarian rule. Even in your own family it is dangerous to be honest.

The authorities were not pleased by "Bezhin lug", and the film was not released, disappeared in archives and later gets lost. The question is why?

Is the film, Stepok being the hero, not politically very correct?

The above question is very hard to answer. During his career Eisenstein developed from the convinced Communist of "Strike" (1925) to the doubts expressed in "Ivan Groznyy" (1944 & 1958), which contains hidden criticism on Stalin. "Bezhin lug" is somewhere in the middle of that development. The story is still politically correct, but is the visual language politically correct also?

In numerous images there is a face at the edge of the frame, symbolizing (for me) the omnipresence of traitors in a totalitarion society.